As it happened: First bunch sprint of Tour de France ends with a dominant win after chaotic run-in

GC damage?

We’re just waiting on the timings to come in, to assess whether any gaps were handed out. Tadej Pogačar came home among a main bunch that’s been classed as 14 seconds down on the small group that contested the sprint finish. Traaen was held up so we’ll see if he has lost any time.

Brilliant sprint from Kooij, who remained calm through all that chaos, hitting out at the perfect time from the perfect position, and his acceleration was devastating. Merlier had speed at the end but started from too far back, while Philipsen had to settle for 5th, ahead of Girmay and Pedersen. Great rides from Kanter in second and Artz in fourth for a Lotto who’ve lost De Lie, but that was pretty emphatic stuff from Kooij.

Kanter was second and Merlier came through for third just ahead of Huub Artz from Lotto.

Olav Kooij (Decathlon CMA CGM) wins stage 5 of the Tour de France

Kooij hits out and gets out in front… and takes it!!!

It’s splitting still and oinly around 20 riders remain to sprint it out!

Into the final kilometre and its Astana and COfidis with the front positions, not what we expected at all.

Astana move up and it’s a flyer, but Alpecin are chaseing it down with one.

Cofidis still have Frentin being piloted. It’s scrappy

2km to go and Uno-X still have the front. NSN just behind with Askey ahead of Girmay.

Roundabout now and we have another crash, just one rider from Cofidis sent into the grass after a touch of shouolders.

Yellow jersey not in the front group! Race leader Torsten Traeen has been chopped by that split, as his own team drill it at the front of the race.

Alex Molenaar (Caja Rural) was the one who crashed most heavily. BUt the race goes on and Uno-X are happemring it on the front with 3.5km to go

That incident has caused a split in the peloton, as well.

5km to go

That crash was just outside the 5km to go banner, so outside of the safety net for any time losses. Let’s see who crashed. QuickStep had three riders involved but none were Merlier it seems.

Crash! Right-hand bend and several riders have gone down.

Alpecin are a bit further back and QuickStep have vanished from view.

Cofidis, working for Milan Frentin, are dominating this now with 7km to go. But now Uno-X are moving up on their shoulders.

Ineos have Dorian Godon as an outsider who’s more of a hilly sprinter but has had a great season so far. They certainly don’t have a big GC card to keep safe as they used to do in sprints.

Cofidis have set up on the left, Ineos on the right. Tudor and Uno-X also have presence in the middle, so it’s not the big sprint trains dominating just yet.

These are the final 5km. It’s ever so slightly false flat down all the way to the final kilometre. We have a corner with 500m to go, which could be crucial.

10km to go

10 to go and we’ve just gone down a mini descent with a couple of sweeping bends. The pace is high and they’re freewheeling, and it’s not going to slow up now.

A reminder of the main contenders

We’ve mentioned Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Premier Tech) and the Belgian is the top Tour de France sprinter of recent years, with 10 stages to his name already. With a strong lead-out train that includes Mathieu van der Poel, he’s a hot favourite.

Philipsen’s closest rival in recent years has been his fellow Belgian, Tim Merlier (Soudal-QuickStep), who bagged two stages last year. He had a disrupted start to the season but has six wins to his name already and looks back to his best.

And now we begin the wind-up to the sprint. All the main teams are getting organised with their trains.

All together!

Baptiste Veistroffer’s solo breakaway comes to an end, with 14km remaining. He was never going to make it but he put in one hell of a ride, animating this stage all on his own. The combativity prize will no doubt be his.

Wright, Asgreen and Paret-Peintre are all back in the bunch again. QuickStep get back to the front. Veistroffer is only 10 seconds ahead with 16km to go.

De Kleijn has been dropped again, this time on the flat. Definitely not his day.

Fred Wright pulls up. The peloton are hot on the heels and he knows it’s no use.

Arvid De Kleijn is back in the bunch. He was dropped on the climb, which does not bode well for his chances in today’s sprint finish. He’s been struggling so far in this Tour, but struggling with a sense of perspective.

Veistroffer is flagging. The Wright/Asgreen group is 20 seconds behind him now, the peloton a further 20 seconds back.

Paret-Peintre is just marking this one. QuickStep have Merlier as a sprint favourite and have been pulling all day. He won’t contribute here but his presence does allow QuickStep to sit back in the bunch now and coax other teams to the front.

Wright has company in Kasper Asgreen (EF) and Valentin Paret-Peintre (QuickStep).

Attack!

Fred Wright was up there as Baudin accelerated for the KOM point and the British champ has basically turned this into an attack. It’s the longest of shots, 25km out, but it’s finally something to get excited about on this snoozy day.

The polka-dot mountains jersey is on the shoulders of Alex Baudin and his EF teammates set him up now as the peloton nears the summit. He duly takes the one remaining point.

Veistroffer crests the climb alone with a lead of 50 seconds. He picks up two mountains classification points.

The day’s only climb

Veistroffer hits the Côte de Baleix, which is our only categorised climb today. It’s a cat-3 number, measuring 1km at 8.8%, so it’s short but still sting. 50 seconds the gap as our leader gets out of the saddle for the first real time since launching his breakaway-making attack at KM0.

Veistroffer, we are told, is known as the ‘Sanglier de Fouesnant’ in his native France – that’s ‘the boar of Fousenant’, the latter being his hometown in Brittany. He’s 26 but this is only his second year as a pro, having previously competed in triathlon. He came through Decathlon’s development set-up before turning pro with Lotto last year. He’s a canny rider who loves an unlikely attack, pulling off a fine stage win at the Tour of Oman earlier this year.

QuickStep have raised the pace now. 33km to go and they have six riders on the front, with the gap to Veistroffer dropping to around the 1:10 mark.

Pedersen is wearing the green jersey after his win yesterday but with 70 points on offer on the finish line, that’s where the green jersey battle will really ignite. Girmay is actually the only rider who could overhaul Pedersen today, but we should get a better sense of who’s capable of hauling in the points on these finishes.

A reminder that the points system is different this year with bumper packages on offer on designated sprint stages, and a general recalibration of the intermediate sprints. More on that in the link below.

Intermediate sprint

An odd one, as XDS Astana launch the sprint and gap the rest of the bunch in the process. Their sprinter Max Kanter is first from the bunch, followed by Pedersen, Girmay, and, on the other side of the road, Philipsen.

45km to go

Veistroffer passes through the intermediate sprint in Vic-en-Bigorre, collecting the maximum 25 points on offer, obviously uncontested. The real battle is coming from the bunch ina. couple of minutes’ time.

Jonas Vingegaard has had some sort of issue and has had to drop back to his team car. He barks at a camera to get out the way and looks a tad stressed as he speeds back to the peloton, but no major dramas at all.

Let’s hear from Biniam Girmay, speaking at the start of today’s stage

“Unfortunately we had a crash yesterday with Jake Stewart so he will not be there in the final lead-out for me. It will cost us for sure. I think Alpecin have a good leadout and Merlier is also strong in this kind of finish. After four hard days everyone is more or les the same, so let’s find out who’s fastest.”

Veistroffer continues to ride really strongly – his average speed so far is nearly 45km/h which is remarkable. He has just under three minutes in hand as he nears the intermediate sprint.

The gap is starting to come down now, it’s 2:50.

The intermediate sprint is in 15km, and obviously with only one rider out front there are a fair number of points still up for grabs for the bunch, so we’ll see a proper sprint there.

Is Cavendish’s stage win record at risk?

A few years ago, a stage like this would have been a big Mark Cavendish day, and we might have been talking about the stage win record he spent the last few years of his career chasing.

Now, that record has come up again recently, but it’s not a fellow sprinter who is at risk of breaking it. No, it’s Tadej Pogačar who is being spoken about as the potential next rider to win 34, 35 or 36 stages. He’s currently the most successful current rider, with 22 wins, the most recent one recorded on Monday.

70km to go

We’re in the build up to the build up to the sprint…

It’s not really hotting up yet, but Soudal-QuickStep and Alpecin-Premier Tech are both massed at the front, chatting tactics and just generally exerting their authority on this race. Tim Merlier and Jasper Philipsen are definitely the two big favourites, two of the purest and fastest sprinters in this bunch.

Vic-en-Bigorre, by the way, is home to one of the best weekend markets you’ll see in southern France.

What’s coming up

There are a couple of points of interest in the final 50km, with an intermediate sprint in Vic-en-Bigorre with 45km to go, followed by the day’s only climb, the category-3 Côte de Baleix (1km at 8.8%) with 25km to go. The intermediate sprint will provide something of a preview of the real thing, with most likely to be keen for the green jersey points on offer, but perhaps cautious about really opening the taps and dulling the legs.

Not a huge amount happening in the race right now. Just water bottles, a lot of water bottles. There are soigneurs regularly placed along the road, and riders are regularly going back to team cars for bottles and ice to try and stay cool. The peloton have just had a nature break, and our leader continues to plough his lonely furrow through the Pyrenean furnace.

Boring?

We’ve gone slightly off-piste here but a surprisingly vigorous debate was sparked in the CN Slack channel this morning, when we were (presciently) discussing whether stages like this are boring, or whether pure sprinters still have a place in the modern Tour de France.

One colleague suddenly suggested that sprint stages are better than mountain stages these days, and it all kicked off from there… Check out the piece below for some wild takes and the chance to have your say.

100km remaining

So, 100 to go and to bring you up to speed we have a lone leader, Baptiste Veistroffer (Lotto-Intermarché), with a lead of 2:45 over the peloton, which is being led by Soudal-QuickStep and Alpecin-Premier Tech.

No De Lie

Lotto Intermarché may not ordinarily chuck a rider up the road on a day like today, but their sprinter Arnaud De Lie is already at home, abandoning the race on stage 3. The Belgian is blighted by bad luck these days and just like at the Giro he fell ill ahead of the Tour and failed to recover.

Veistroffer was in fact tasked with dropping back to help De Lie at the very back of the race amid his suffering on stage 3. De Lie actually told Veistroffer to go ahead and leave him towards the end of the stage, as the time cut loomed, and De Lie eventually climbed off only a few kilometres from the finish.

“Three minutes only?!”

Veistroffer pulls up alongside his team car and we can just about make out what they’re saying.

“Three minutes only? With one guy in front?”

A first shot of our breakaway hero, Baptiste Veistroffer.

Uno-X controlling

The gap reaches the three-minute mark after around 15km of racing and that’s the cue for the peloton to start picking up the pace to control this eminently controllable breakaway.

It’s Uno-X on the front, fulfilling their duties as the team with the yellow jersey. Torsten Træen is the man in yellow, the Norwegian taking the jersey from Tadej Pogačar thanks to his presence in yesterday’s big break.